Lumu and Watcher Cat

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Last night I did not do much in the way of gaming because I came home just mentally drained from work, and wound up logging in and out of various things while watching a couple movies.  Instead unsurprisingly I am going to talk a bit about Monster Hunter World.  This weekend I spent a significant amount of time upstairs playing it and am now in the Rotten Vale area of the map.  Weirdly enough the main screen of the game still shows the Coral Highlands, but I do love how it occasionally changes to areas that you now have access to.  At this point I have taken down Anjanath, Barroth, Great Girros, Great Jagras, Jyuratodus, Kulu-Ya-Ku, Paolumu, Pukei-Pukei, Radobaan, Tobi-Kadachi, and Tzitzi-Ya-Ku…  which feels like a lot of Monsters but ultimately I think the grand scheme of thing I am barely progressed at all.

In fact after my last play session I believe I finally hit Hunter Rank 7 which  is just a drop in the bucket compared to past Monster Hunter series games that capped out at like 999.  There is an achievement for getting to Hunter Rank 100, so at the very least World goes that high but I have no clue how much higher it continues after that.  Regardless…  I am a babe in the woods when it comes to this game and nowhere near as far along as a good number of my friends.  My play style is just way more meandering I believe than others…  and weirdly enough after playing with Tam for a bit over the weekend he wins the bloodlust trophy for this game.  He kept getting distracted during hunts by whatever happened to cross our path… whereas I seem to have a laser focus on the beast at hand often times ignoring collectibles long the way when I am in serious hunting mode.

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Paolumu or “Lumu” as everyone seems to call it is legitimately one of the weirder hunts I have participated in.  This crazy squirrel bat thing inflates an air bladder… and then uses it to bounce up and down on you for insane amounts of damage.  I managed to rip it to shreds with my long sword and even managed to completely wreck its wings…  which seemed to effect how well it could fly but not necessarily if it could fly.  That was a completely different experience from when I fought Pukei-Pukei and somehow managed to actually ground that monster completely once its wings arrived at a similar tattered state.

Tam joined in the fight and got completely distracted for a little bit when Tzitzi-Ya-Ku crossed our path.  The worst times were when we managed to be fighting Lulu and Tzitzi at the same time… and the stupid lizard would flash knocking us all out temporarily.  Every time Tam would mount the back of Lumu it would end up subsequently taking off and flying away with him in which I wound up running after trying to sort out where it would land.  That said when we got Lumu to a point where the wings were ripped and shredded it seemed unable to really go very far and mostly just flew around the area we were in at the time.  Regardless… it was a goofy monster to fight and my strategy largely wound up with me trying desperately to hit is air bladder.  I do not look forward to hunting them for fuzzy gear because at least with long sword they were super annoying to fight.

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I feel like I need to talk about how inconvenient grouping is in this game.  On Sunday afternoon we managed to get a four player group of AggroChat folks all together trying to do some of the low level stuff that Kodra needed since he started super late.  The biggest problem we kept running into was the fact that in the grand scheme of things… what we wanted to do was just create an expedition and go off and hunt everything currently available in zone.  However there really is no good way to do that… and functionally one of two things needs to happen.  Firstly you can start a quest and after its completion just agree to stay in zone and return to camp instead of base.  The second option is to have someone start an expedition and run and find a monster… allowing you to fire off a SOS beacon…  and then hoping that all of the folks you actually intend to group with can find it in the cludgy join quest interface before someone random pops in.

This system just works counter intuitive to everything I expect from grouping in games.  My brain works in a mindset of forming a group and then going off and doing a thing…   not doing a thing and then hoping people can somehow join you after the thing has already started.  We had a PSN chat session going and it would have been so much nicer if we could have simply invited that “fireteam” for lack of a better term to participate in something rather than having to time everything just so.  Because grouping is so cumbersome… I largely spend most of my time roaming around the world by myself.  After the challenge of trying to get all four of us together in the same group… I am maybe rethinking my decisions before to jump into random games and “help” people out.  What if I was the fourth rando that ruined someone else’s attempts to play with the folks they had on voice chat at that moment?

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The real victory of the weekend is that I managed to get high enough hunter rank to do the timed event needed to get the parts to craft my palico a watcher suit from Horizon Zero Dawn.  I managed to get enough parts on the first outing to craft the suit itself, and I largely decided to ignore the weapon considering it was such a massive downgrade from what I was currently using.  The watcher suit itself however has an insane amount of defense and as a result it has gone into my main rotation of palico gear.  It does feel a little bit weird to see a watcher cat roaming around with me in the wilds because there are certain instincts I still have from playing Horizon Zero Dawn.  At least I am not playing with a bow…  otherwise I would potentially keep trying to shoot out my palico’s eye.

In the grand scheme of things I am still really enjoying this game and happy to be getting indoctrinated into the rich world of Monster Hunter.  As a closing note…  I’ve been seeing something weird happening in the Destiny YouTube and Twitch communities.  There are so many of these Destiny-centric channels that have been essentially rededicating themselves to Monster Hunter instead.  While this follows my own current evolution game time wise…  considering I only actually played a single match this past Iron Banner, it does feel really odd to have my news sources for Destiny turning into a wall of Monster Hunter.  On one hand it makes me happy… and on the other hand it makes me frustrated that the state of Destiny has reached a point where folks are abandoning it in droves.  At the end of the day you have to play whatever it is that currently makes you happy, and I to have been almost entirely devoting myself to this weird and wonderful universe of Monster Hunter.

2 thoughts on “Lumu and Watcher Cat”

  1. As someone who has played neither, I have to say that posts about Monster Hunter (yours and other bloggers currently playing it) are about a million times more interesting than posts about Destiny or Destiny 2 (by anyone, ever). Whatever Destiny may be like to play it has to be about the dullest game I have ever tried to follow just by reading other peoples’ accounts. MH on the other hand is fascinating.

  2. Not a real surprise with Destiny 2 considering all of the issues that have persisted since launch. I hated being a nay-sayer for it because I wanted it to be better than Destiny 1 in every way. Disappointing because the potential was never realized, even backwards in some ways. Glad to hear streamers and players have found something more interesting to dedicate their time too. Which is what is great about gaming – so many options! Developers beware =)

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